At work, we have a System Architect who is a genius. He writes many technical papers himself on topics to start off the design work, as well as pull together all ideas into a System Architecture SUMMARY document greater than 400 pages long. He leads most if not all the major technical development threads for a team of hundreds of engineers across many countries. The product we are producing is a unique Satcom system delivering new and vital communication services across parts of the world never served before.

Of course, the System Architect is clever enough to learn and do everything himself but if he does then it would take so long that we will never deliver a system to the customer !

What I like about James point is that as I visibly contribute to a part of the system design, interface definition, integration, testing, ... I am part of the collective genius, and hence I am a minor genius whereas the System Architect is also a collective Genius but a much more major one

Did u see program about machines watching over us? BBC 2 this week? Was my first acquaintance with her, I'm ashamed to say, but thought her ideas very interesting, also body language in interview was weird.BTW did Sociology of crime and deviance at LSE with David Morris and Paul Rock. Course, and place, full of policemen doing Psychology/Sociology degrees.....